quark (kwôrk), any of a group of ELEMENTARY PARTICLES that are the basic constituents of all hadrons. Quarks have fractional charges of 1/3 or 2/3 of the basic charge of the electron or proton. There is evidence for five kinds, or flavors, of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, and bottom; the discovery of evidence for the existence of the sixth, labeled top, was announced in 1994. Each flavor of quark is believed to come in three varieties, differing in a property called color. The baryons, a subgroup of the hadrons that includes the proton and neutron, consist of three quarks. A proton consists of two up quarks and a down quark, and a neutron of two down quarks and an up quark. Three antiquarks make up the antibaryons. Mesons, the other subgroup, consist of a quark-antiquark pair.

quark (kwôrk, kwärk) noun
A soft, creamy acid-cured cheese of central Europe made from whole milk.
[German, from Middle High German quarc, of Slavic origin.]

quark (kwôrk, kwärk) noun
Any of a group of hypothetical elementary particles having electric charges of magnitude one-third or two-thirds that of the electron, regarded as constituents of all hadrons.

[from Three quarks for Muster Mark!, a line in _Finnegans Wake_ by James Joyce.]

Word History: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark." This passage of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend. The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk, like the cawing of a crow, against King Mark. Thus, Joyce uses the word quark, which comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning "to caw, croak," and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning "to caw, screech like a bird." But Joyce's quark was not what it has become: "any of a group of hypothetical subatomic particles proposed as the fundamental units of matter." Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who proposed these particles, in a private letter of June 27, 1978, to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, said that he had actually been influenced by Joyce's word in naming the particle, although the influence was subconscious at first. Gell-Mann was thinking of using the pronunciation (kwôrk) for the particle, possibly something he had picked up from Finnegans Wake, which he "had perused from time to time since it appeared in 1939. . . . The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect" (originally there were only three subatomic quarks). Gell-Mann, however, wanted to pronounce the word with (ô) not (ä), as Joyce seemed to indicate by rhyming words in the vicinity such as Mark. Gell-Mann got around that "by supposing that one ingredient of the line 'Three quarks for Muster Mark' was a cry of 'Three quarts for Mister . . .' heard in H.C. Earwicker's pub."

• 604 track _Strangeness and Charm_ by Snake Thing off of _Scorch/Strangeness and Charm_ 12" on  (1997)
• track _Quark, Strangeness & Charm_ MP3 by Hawkwind
• 604 track _Sub Atomic_ MP3 (192k) by Logic Bomb off of _Headware_ CD
• samples: "atoms, electrons, quarks, brain, the universe... behind the electrons we find new mysteries..."; "(Fastened) particles moving along the shores of...";  (All from the computer game _Alpha Centauri_)
• 604 track _Beyond The Subatomic_ MP3 by Space Tribe off of _The Future's Right Now_ 12"x2/CDon Spirit Zone (1998)
• 604 track _Quark_ MP3 (192k) by Shakatura off of s/t CD on Ceiba

• Quark - a flavor of robot in the Williams' video arcade game Robotron: 2084, along with Grunts, Spheroids and Tanks
• track _Quark Angel (tied up with superstrings)_ by Freedom Of Sound off of _Quark Angel_ 12" on Filterless (1995)
• electronic dub track _Chant Of A Poor Man (Quark Remix)_ MP3 by Leftfield off of _Stealth Remixes_ 12"x2 on Hard Hands #060 (2000)
• track _Quark_ MP3 by BT
• track _Quark Soup_ MP3 by DJ Spooky off of _Necropolis: The Dialogic Project_ on Knitting (1996)
• book _Extrasensory Perception Of Quarks_ by Stephen M. Phillips

Families and generations:

1st: electron   electron neutrino     up quark      down quark
2nd: muon     muon neutrino     strange quark     charm quark
3rd: tau      tau neutrino      bottom quark       op quark

3/21/02 - Quark's Bar & Restaurant located at the Star Trek Experience - Hilton Hotel - Las Vegas, Nevada.  Star Trek motif, including "damage report" (aka the check).  ultra cheesy vibes but i ended up consuming mass quantities of wrap with green tortillas, pasta salad and cucumber - dubbed "The Wrap Of Khan".  you can also get a stacked set of onion rings on a rack called "The Holy Rings Of Betazed (a telepathic treat)".
 
  

A parallel between Rubik's Cube and particle physics was noted by mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, and then extended (and modified) by Anthony E. Durham. Essentially, clockwise and counterclockwise "twists" of corner cubies may be compared to the electric charges of quarks (+2/3 and -1/3) and antiquarks (-2/3 and +1/3). Feasible combinations of cubie twists are paralleled by allowable combinations of quarks and antiquarks—both cubie twist and the quark/antiquark charge must total to an integer. Combinations of two or three twisted corners may be compared to various hadrons.

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